the one and the many: studies in the philosophy of order and ultimacy

7/23/2019 The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy

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The One and the ManyBy

R. J. Rushdoony


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Copyright 1971, 2007Mark R. Rushdoony

Chalcedon / Ross House BooksPO Box 158

Vallecito, CA 95251www.chalcedon.edu/store

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any formor by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwiseexcept for

brief quotations for the purpose of review or comment, without the prior written permission ofthe publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006926982

ISBN: 978-1-879998-46-9Printed in the United States of America
http://www.chalcedon.edu/storehttp://www.chalcedon.edu/storehttp://www.chalcedon.edu/store


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ToH. W. Luhnow

whose thoughtful role in the furtherance of research, science, and scholarship is of major andcentral importance to this age.


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Other books byRousas John Rushdoony

The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. IThe Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. II, Law & Society

The Institutes of Biblical Law, Vol. III, The Intent of the LawSystematic Theology (2 volumes)Chariots of Prophetic Fire

To Be As GodNoble Savages

The Death of MeaningIntellectual SchizophreniaHebrews, James & Jude

The Gospel of JohnLarceny in the Heart

The Biblical Philosophy of History

The Mythology of ScienceThy Kingdom ComeFoundations of Social OrderThis Independent Republic

The Nature of the American SystemThe Atheism of the Early Church

The Messianic Character of American EducationThe Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum

Christianity and the StateSalvation and Godly Rule

Romans & GalatiansGods Plan for Victory

Politics of Guilt and PityRoots of ReconstructionThe One and the Many

Revolt Against MaturityBy What Standard?

Law & Liberty

For a complete listing of available books by Rousas John Rushdoony and other Christianreconstructionists, click below:

Chalcedon Catalog
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89093637/Chalcedon-Cataloghttp://www.scribd.com/doc/89093637/Chalcedon-Cataloghttp://www.scribd.com/doc/89093637/Chalcedon-Catalog


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Table of Contents

IThe One and the Many1.The Nature of the Problem2.Attempts at a Solution3.The Trinitarian Answer4.The Unitarian Failure5.Faith and Science6.Political Perspectives7.Implications for Education and Freedom8.The Question of Authority

IIThe Ground of Liberty1.Introduction2.Liberty and Dialectics

3.The Enlightenment4.The Crisis5.The Libertarian Failure6.The Christian Answer7.Law and Liberty

IIIThe Continuity of Being1.Egypt2.Mesopotamia3.Persia

4.The Chain of Being5.The Bible and the Concept of Being6.Being and Society

IVThe Unity of the Polis1.Greece: The Humanists Homeland2.Greek Science and Philosophy3.The Chaos-Order Dialectic4.The Esoteric State5.The Polis as Cosmos

6.The One and the Many7.Socrates and Plato8.Aristotle

VRome: The City of Man1.The Priority of the State2.Cicero and the Rule of Reason3.Julius Caesar


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4.Chaos Cults5.Cicero and Revolution6.Cicero and the State7.Caesar and the New State8.The New Perversity

9.Marcus Aurelius10.Commodus11.Last Hopes in Chaos

VIChrist: The World De-divinized1.War Against the Gods2.Mysticism3.Gnosticism4.Christianity and the Family5.Abortion

6.Emperor Worship7.Creation and History8.History and God9.Constantine the Great10.Arianism11.Nicaea12.Constantinople I13.The Orthodox Faith vs. Heresies14.Ephesus15.Chalcedon

16.Pelagianism and Asceticism17.Deprecation of Matter and History18.Augustine on the Pelagians19.The Church as New Rome20.Later Councils21.The One and the Many

VIIThe Return of Dialectic Thought1.Boethius2.Scholasticism3.Aquinas Task4.Thomistic Dialecticism5.Noetics and Ethics6.Common Ground in Being7.The One and the Many in Aquinas8.The State

VIIIFrederick II and Dante: The World Re-divinized


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1.Medieval Civilization2.Frederick II3.Dante4.Dantes View of the State5.The Witness of The Divine Comedy

6.Pope John XXIII7.Pope Paul VI

IXThe Immanent One as the Power State1.Castiglione2.Machiavelli

XThe Reformation: The Problem Redefined1.Luther2.Against Erasmus

3.Luther and the One and Many4.Calvin5.Calvin on Law and Love6.Richard Hooker

XIUtopia: The New City of Man1.Humanism and Utopia2.Thomas More3.Francis Bacon4.Campanella

5.Hobbes, Locke, Harrington

XIIAutonomous Man and the New Order1.Descartes2.John Locke3.Berkeley4.Alexander Pope5.La Mettrie6.Hume7.Rousseau8.Immanuel Kant

XIIIWar Against the Beyond1.Hegel2.Feuerbach3.Max Stirner4.Karl Marx5.Nietzsche


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6.Sartre7.Wittgenstein8.Marcuse9.Hammarskjold

XIVThe Christian Perspective1.Modernism2.Van Til3.At the End of an Age

APPENDIXObservations on the End of an Age1.The End of an Age2.The Religious Foundations of Culture

The Author

The Ministry of ChalcedonEndnotes


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Chapter IThe One and the Many

1. The Nature of the Problem

One of the most basic and continuing problems of mans his tory is the question of the one andthe many and their relationship. The fact that in recent years men have avoided discussion of thismatter has not ceased to make their unstated presuppositions with respect to it determinative oftheir thinking.

Much of the present concern about the trends of these times is literally wasted on useless effortbecause those who guide the activities cannot resolve, with the philosophical tools at hand tothem, the problem of authority. This is at the heart of the problem of the proper function ofgovernment, the power to tax, to conscript, to execute for crimes, and to wage warfare. Thequestion of authority is again basic to education, to religion, and to the family. Where does

authority rest, in democracy or in an elite, in the church or in some secular institution, in God orin reason? The implications of the problem are religious, as will be shown, but the fact that it isnot discussed permits an ignorant equalization of various religions and diverse theologies. Thedifferences between Christianity and atheism are basic, as are the differences between Buddhismand Christianity. Russian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, andCalvinism each has its characteristic culture or consequence in the social and political action ofits own presupposition. Failure to recognize the fact that all routes to God are not equally valid orrelevant to the maintenance of historic Western culture, especially in the United States, hasextensively clouded the possibility of an intelligible answer. The plea that this is a pluralisticculture is merely recognition of the problemnot an answer. The problem of authority is notanswerable by reason alone, and basic to reason itself are pre-theoretical suppositions or axioms1

which represent essentially religious commitments. And one such basic commitment is withrespect to the question of the one and the many.2 The fact that students can graduate from ouruniversities as philosophy majors without any awareness of the importance or centrality of thisquestion does not make the one and many any less basic to our thinking. The difference betweenEast and West, and between various aspects of Western history and culture, rests on answers tothis problem which, whether consciously or unconsciously, have been made. Whether recognizedor not, every argument and every theological, philosophical, political, or any other exposition isbased on a presupposition about man, God, and societyabout reality. This presupposition rulesand determines the conclusion; the effect is the result of a cause. And one such basicpresupposition is with reference to the one and the many.

This avoidance of the problem makes necessary a few elementary definitions as a prelude to adiscussion. The one refers not to a number but to unity and oneness; in metaphysics, it hasusually meant the absolute, the supreme Idea for Plato, the universe for Parmenides, Being asSuch for Plotinus, and so on. The onecan be a separate whole, or it can be the sum of things intheir analytic or synthetic wholeness; that is, it can be a transcendent one, which is the ground ofall being, or it can be an immanent one. The manyrefers to the particularity or individuality ofthings; the universe is full of a multitude of beings; is the truth concerning them inherent in theirindividuality, or is it in their basic oneness? If it is their individuality, then the manyare ultimate


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and the proper source of authority, and we have philosophical Nominalism. If it is their oneness,then the one is ultimate, and we have Realism. According to Realism, universals, which areterms applicable to all the universe and can be called real second substances, are aspects of theone Idea and exist within it. Egyptian, much Greek, and medieval scholastic thought has beenRealistic. For Nominalism, abstract or general terms have no real existence and are mere

names applied to aspects of reality; reality belongs to particulars, actual physical particulars, sothat the truth of being is simply that individual things exist. Truth is not some abstractionconcerning particular things but is simply the fact of particularity.

2.Attempts at a Solution

The importance of these two philosophies becomes readily apparent if we analyze thepresuppositions of dominant modern politico-economic theories. Nominalism has, since Occam,held extensive sway in modern history. Materialism and Empiricism have been essentiallyNominalistic. Anarchism is the logical conclusion of such a philosophy. No truth or reality or

law exists apart from particulars and individuals. God, law, government, church, and morality areabstracts which represent a tyranny to man; liberty means an unshackling of these chains and theaffirmation of individuality as the essential aspect of reality. A logical champion of suchNominalism, as witness Thoreau and Robert LeFevre, is hostile to all religion and governmentand favors only a purely individual religion, if any, a self-government as the only true or possiblegovernment.3 The Realist affirms instead the reality of the one rather than the many; for Platosfollowers, the Idea, and the State, had a reality which particulars did not possess. For theScholastics, as Aquinas, the Church, as the representative of the absolute reality and acontinuation of the incarnation, had a reality above and beyond its every member. AfterChristianity lost its primary power in U.S. history, Nominalism took over and found expressionin the thinking of the so-called robber barons. Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) reintroduced

Realism in its pragmatic and non-religious form into American thought, and Dewey developed itextensively. In England, G. E. Moore (b. 1873) molded Fabian thought and thereby influencedAmerica. The priority of the state to the individual, and the reality of the state as against theunreality of the individual, marked such thinking. For Dewey, the Great Community was thebasic fact of history. Towards its actualization in history, all effort must be bent. But, for Dewey,the individual and the soul were invalid concepts; man was truly man, not as an individual, but,after Aristotle, in society and supremely in the state. True education thus for Dewey meant, notthe development of the individual in terms of learning, but his socialization. Progressiveeducation is Realistic, as is parochial education to a great extent. Most basic educators,

however, are Nominalists: educate the individual in terms of the particular facts of the universewithout reference to God, truth, or morality. Further instances of the implications of the one and

many problem can be seen in art. In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, art was Nominalisticand generally aimed at a photographic reproduction of subjects, so that in some instances thevery warts on a mans nose were religiously depicted. Reality belonged to a particularity, toindividuals, and ideas were less important progressively than material facts. Medieval art hadbeen dedicated to philosophical Realism, i.e., more interested in portraying universal ideas (faith,love, etc.) than persons, who were particulars and less real. Modern art is non-ThomisticRealism; it despises things, particulars, individuals, and is given to portraying the experience ofunity. It is thus a pagan mysticism and not infrequently seeks the mystical experience in drugs


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because of its hunger for the absorptive one. In Science, a clear instance of Nominalism isKinsey, who, in his studies of sex, denied the validity of universals and affirmed the sole realityof particulars; sexual acts of any character are thus real, but moral laws are not. They are merelynominal, conventional, and alien to the nature of things.

In much Far Eastern thought, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, the problem of the one and themany no longer exists in many circles, since centuries ago resolution was made in favor of theone. The goal of being is thus absorption into the one, and, since particularity is unreal or evenan illusion, it follows that history is unimportant. Thus, the Buddhist Milarepa could declare:

Because I see the self-face of the View,The thought of contrast by itself dissolves;

How then can I have the Idea-of-Twothe self and others?

The View is void of limit and discrimination.

When in the Practice I become absorbed,Good and evil are reduced to self-liberation;How then can I have the Idea-of-Two

happiness and suffering?The Practice is devoid of limitary feelings and experience.

When I adhere to the self-continuance of Action,Dislike is reduced to self-liberation;How then can I have the Impulse-of-Two

craving and aversion?The Action is free from limitary attachment.

Since self-liberation is the Fruit,Both Nirvana and Samsara are reduced to it.How then can I have the Idea-of-Two

getting and Abandoning?

Absence of fear and hope isThe Fruit of this great Practice.4

Meaning disappears from such a system, since meaning imposes limits and requiresdiscrimination, all of which are alien to the unity of the one. Since history is struggle anddiscrimination, history means a revolt against the undifferentiated unity of being. As a result, FarEastern cultures in a sense abdicated from history when their philosophies so resolved theproblem of the one and the many. Only as Western thought has infiltrated Asia has history againgained relevancy. By virtue of its predisposition to absorption into the great one, Eastern thoughthas been ready to accept such various forms of the one as the Communist International, theecumenical church, and the United Nations. If meaningis accepted, it is the meaning of unity.


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In the West, philosophy has usually been dialectical, i.e., holding two antithetical principles intension, such as form and matter in Greek philosophy, nature and grace in Scholasticism, andnature and freedom in modern thought, as Dooyeweerd has shown.5 Because of this dialecticaltension, it has been unable to rest content with a final solution as has the East. In the West,therefore, both Realism and Nominalism, the one and the many, have had their uneasy sway.

The Enlightenment, Deism, and illuminist thought exalted the principle of the one at the sacrificeof the many. Alexander Pope, in hisEssay on Man, stated this Enlightenment faith clearly:

All are parts of one stupendous wholeWhose body Nature is, and God the soul.

This whole was for Pope present in every part, and the parts found their true being in the whole.As a result, the Enlightenment hope was in a social order, introduced by the scientific State,which would liberate man and unite him in that true world brotherhood which represented hisonly hope.6 This faith received a major setback in the American rebellion, a Christian counter-

revolution, but it is again prevalent and has its great institutional formulation in the UnitedNations. The religious reduction of all reality to one is pantheism, or, in more sophisticatedforms, existentialism and neo-orthodoxy. Thepoliticalreduction of all humanity to one, with theobliteration of all differences, is the United Nations hope. It is a faith present in many forms.Thus, a state law barring a conservative Bible club from state colleges as divisive (becauselimited to fundamentalistic Protestants and excluding Jews, Roman Catholics, atheists, andothers) presupposes unityas the one virtue. Divisivenessis by definition evil. It is thus apparentthat both Realism and Nominalism are ultimately destructive of the idea of truth.Nominalism admits no reality in universals other than particularity, and Realism ultimately

reduces all universals to one, unity, and, especially in nonreligious forms, is quickly hostile toany notion that truthand unitycan be in conflict.

The Protestant Reformation asserted the priority of truth to unity; Modernist Protestantismincreasingly denies the possibility of their conflictimplicitly accepting authoritarian unity:truth is unity, and unity is truth. Ecumenicity (all churches in one) is of itself therefore deemedboth good and necessary. Politically, the United Nations is also seen as both good and necessary.The possibility of improvement is admitted, but not the possibility of elimination, for both hopeand progress rest in the development of the principle of unity. With respect to the United States,Van Zandt deplores the fact that the decisive liberal thinker, Jefferson, was a Nominalist, andhence given to an anarchistic individualism as expressed in his agrarianism. As a result,Americas French Revolution has awaited the twentieth century,7 but now the Realism ofPeirce and modern thinkers is restoring the primacy of the one. From such a perspective, a one-world order is a necessity.

Ideas thus do have consequences. More than that, the presuppositions behind ideas haveconsequences. The differ-ence betweenpresuppositionsand intentionsis an important one. Withrespect to foreign aid, the U. S. program has had a liberating and ostensibly Christian intentionwhile actually resting on a thorough-going Marxian dialectical materialism, as Groseclose hasably pointed out.8 This presupposition, rather than its announced intention, has governed theoutcome of foreign aid. A religious and philosophical consistency is thus important. Eclectic


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systems, which lack systematic consistency and organization, are doomed. In facing the menacesof Marxism and anti-Christianity, we cannot succeed if our own premises or presuppositionscarry concealed Marxist and anti-Christian axioms.

The problem of the one and the many may be avoided in the classroom, pulpit, and press, but it

cannot be avoided in life. The question remains: which has primacy and priority? Is the statemore important than the individual, or does the individual have a reality which the state does notpossess? What is the locus of Christianity, the believer or the church? Does marriage have areality which makes its condition mandatory irrespective of the conditions of the husband andwife, or do the persons in the marriage take priority, in their wishes, over the idea of marriage? Iseducation to be geared to the development of the individual or to the welfare of society?

Raising these questions immediately makes apparent the fact that our society doeshave opinionson the one and the many, and that both Nominalist and Realist have in the last centuryextensively influenced our education, religion, and legislation.

3. The Trinitarian Answer

Orthodox Christianity has asserted another answer to the problem, and, to make clear thatanswer, certain elementary distinctions are necessary. Theology and philosophy distinguishbetween the ontological trinity and the economical trinity in speaking of God. The Father, theSon, and the Holy Ghost are each a personality, and together they constitute the triune andexhaustively personal, totally self-conscious God. God is totally self-conscious, meaning that Hehas no hidden, unknown aspects of His being, no unexploited potentiality. He is actuality, self-conscious and personal. Each person of the trinity is equally God. As Van Til has stated it,

Each is as much God as are the other two. The Son and the Spirit do not derivetheir being from the Father. The diversity and the unity in the Godhead aretherefore equally ultimate; they are exhaustively correlative to one another andnot correlative to anything else.9

The trinity so described is called the ontological trinity, that is, the trinity in its relationship toitself, in terms of its own being. When the relationship of the triune God to His creation is dis-cussed, the economical trinity is referred to, i.e., the trinity in its relationship to its activity withrespect to the universe, creating, sustaining, or redeeming it. Our concern now is with theontological trinity, God in His being. The being of God is infinite, eternal, unchangeable, andholy. Biblical thought differentiates between created being and uncreated being, whereas all non-

Christian systems speak of being in general, one undifferentiated being shared, in variousdegrees, by God and man alike. In these non-Christian metaphysics, the idea of the great chain ofbeingof the ultimate oneness of God and manis implicit or explicit. Evil is non-being, andman either moves downward into non-being or upward on the ladder or chain into absorption by,or full participation in, being. Salvation is thus metaphysical, a development of being, whereasfor biblical faith it is ethical, involving a new life and a new relationship to God, a change fromstatus as a covenant-breaker to status as a covenant-keeper. Because man is a created being, he is


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totally under the government of God, and his thinking is true only as subject to God, whom hemeets in every aspect of the universe because it is totally the creation of God.

The main point is that if man could look anywhere and not be confronted with therevelation of God then he could not sin in the Biblical sense of the term. Sin is the

breaking of the law of God. God confronts man everywhere. He cannot in the na-ture of the case confront man anywhere if he does not confront him everywhere.God is one; the law is one. If man could press one button on the radio of hisexperience and not hear the voice of God then he would always press that buttonand not the others. But man cannot even press the button of his own self-consciousness without hearing the requirement of God.10

Thus, all factuality in the universe is created and understandable only in terms of the ontologicaltrinity. Because He created it, its meaning is also created meaning, derived from Him who madeit. This points us to the ontological trinity as the answer to the problem of the one and the many.Immediately we have a distinction which does not exist in non-Christian thought: we have a

temporal one and many in the created universe, and we have an eternal One-and-Many in theontological trinity, an absolute and self-complete unity. In Van Til we have a definitiveformulation of the implications:

Using the language of the One-and-Many question we contend that in God theone and many are equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental thandiversity, and diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The persons ofthe Trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another. The Son and the Spirit areontologically on a par with the Father. It is a well-known fact that all heresies inthe history of the church have in some form or other taught subordinationism.Similarly, we believe, all heresies in apologetic methodology spring from someform of subordinationism.11

Since both the one and the many are equally ultimate in God, it immediately becomes apparentthat these two seemingly contradictory aspects of being do not cancel one another but are equallybasic to the ontological trinity: one God, three persons. Again, since temporal unity and pluralityare the products and creation of this triune God, neither the unity nor the plurality can demandthe sacrifice of the other to itself. Thus, man and government are equally aspects of createdreality.The locus of Christianity is both the believer and the church; they are not independent ofor prior to one another. The wishes of husband and wife do not take priority over marriage, nordoes the institution of marriage have primacy over the partners to it; marriage indeed is a type ofan eternal reality (Eph. 5:22-25), but man is himself created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27).Education must be geared both to the individual and to society, but, above all, to God.

4. The Unitarian Failure

It becomes apparent at once why Unitarianism has floundered between the one and the many,between anarchism and statism.


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Lacking as it does any doctrine of the equal ultimacy of the one and the many in the ontologicaltrinity, it has accepted, since its orientation is the temporal, either the ultimacy of man or of thestate. Mohammedanism, because of its unitar-ianism, has been primarily a monolithic statistorder, Islam. Its denial of free-will and espousal of rigid determinism is related to this theologicalpremise. Since plurality has no ultimate reality in Mohammedanism, the freedom of the many is

an academic question; the one will of Allah governs all reality. The tendency of Mohammedanthought, when not arrested by statist action, to run into mysticism is an obvious and natural one.Since the one alone has ultimate reality, the proper goal of the many is absorption into that one.Since the one alone has ultimacy, the one alone has freedom. There is no Reformed orAugustinian distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. Indeed, if two ingredients arelacking in a system of thought, i.e., the ontological trinity and a distinction between created anduncreated being, this distinction is bluffed, in that both proximate and ultimate causes, if thedifference is made, are alike derived from a common well of being and are basically one. ForCalvin, responsible proximate causes rested precisely on the total, all-comprehensive ultimatecause; that is, the Christian doctrine of free will rests on the eternal counsel of God, onpredestination. As the Westminster Confessionstated it,

Although, in relation to the foreknowledge, and decree of God, the first cause, allthings come to pass immutably and infallibly, Yet, by the same providence, heordereth them to fall out according to the nature of second causes, eithernecessarily, freely, or contingently.12

God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will,freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so as therebyneither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures,nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but ratherestablished.13

In this perspective, libertyand laware not hostile factors but necessary aspects of one another, sothat the one cannot exist without the other. The eternal One-and-Many is both unity andplurality, both totally free, being self-determined, and, being fully self-conscious, having also atotal counsel, predestinating all things by His eternal decree. Law and liberty coincide in theontological trinity; in the temporal one and many, the fulfilment of creation is in terms of theglorious liberty of the sons of God, their growth within the structure of Gods law (Rom. 8).

By and large, the Unitarian influence in U. S. history has been statist. Very early, Unitarianthinkers led the country into a messianic view of the state as mans source of salvation and oftrue order, and also into statist education. Even in so cautious a man as Emerson, some of thesefacets appear. In 1844, inEssays, Second Series, Emerson, in Nominalist and Realist, affirmedhis support of Realism and saw Nature and natural process as the incarnation and distribution ofthe godhead. This meant that no part or particular in Nature could permanently express orincarnate the truth, which rested inprocess.

Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others;and their trick is their natural defense. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom


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Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance ofpower.14

In The American Scholar, an address of 1837, Emerson asserted an ostensibly extremeindividualism which was actually a dissolution of the individual to give ground for the totalitar-

ian conception of society. The common will he saw embodied in representative men. In 1838,in An Address (Delivered in Divinity College, Cambridge), Emerson declared, The soulknows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the Universe. In LiteraryEthics, he declared:

The man of genius should occupy the whole space between God or pure mind andthe multitude of uneducated men. He must draw from the infinite Reason, on oneside; and he must penetrate into the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other.From one, he must draw his strength; to the other, he must owe his aim. The oneyokes him to the real; the other, to the apparent.15

The man of genius is thus for his age the incarnation of Reality, but the people whom he servesare merely appearances, the apparent. This is a parallel development to the Hegelian and

Marxist doctrine of the elite and the dictatorship of the prole tariat. In writing on History inEssays, First Series(1841), Emerson stated that There is one mind in common to all individualmen. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

16But since most men have only ameager participation in this great one, the common being, the great representative men becometheir voice and representative in that era. These men are the true state.

To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance of the wise manthe State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. Thewise man is the State.17

While Emerson was ready to affirm with Jefferson that the least government was the bestgovernment, he laid the foundation for statism. The utilitarian belief in nature as the perfectmechanism working to effect the greatest good of the greatest number he transferred to thestate:

As we say in our modern politics, catching at last the language of morals, that theobject of the State is the greatest good of the greatest number,so, the reason wemust give for the existence of the world is, that it is for the benefit of all being.18

It is no surprise then to learn that Emerson was in the second echelon of the Secret Six, a groupdedicated to forcing statist and military action with respect to slavery and supporting JohnBrown.19Emerson, in public addresses, seemed to regard Brown as the needed representativeman of the hour.20 Just as in Nominalism universals become abstract universals, mere verbalgeneralizations without any meaning in themselves, so in Realism individuals tend to becomemere abstract particulars, thin in being and meaningless apart from the great one. In Emerson,representative men (and the state) were the incarnation of that oneness for their particular era,occupying the whole space as true mediators of reality. This is the essential doctrine of ancientBabylonian statism and a continuing foundation of new Towers of Babel.


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5.Faith and Science

In the ontological trinity, we have a concrete universal and concrete particulars. Moreover, InGods being there are no particulars not related to the universal and there is nothing universal

that is not fully expressed in the particulars.21

This means that the trinity is totally self-containedand totally explicable in terms of itself. In turn, this means that the temporal one and many,having been created by God, is entirely and only explicable in terms of the ontological trinity,and that the non-believers knowledge of the universe is in terms of borrowed premises, for thelogic of any other premise is, as Van Til has repeatedly shown, the denial of our experience andof reality. Nominalism ends by dissolving the world into an endless sea of unrelated andmeaningless facts or particulars, whereas Realism progressively denies the validity of particulars,of the many, and absorbs them into an undifferentiated and shoreless ocean of being. At eitherend, definition, meaning, and truth disappear; at one end total relativism and anarchy, and, at theother, total authoritarianism.

It is thus understandable why Van Til states that the Christian should frankly begin his scientificwork on the presupposition of the cotermineity of the universal and the particular in theGodhead.

22 This is the concealed premise whereby the unbelieving scientist operates; heassumes the validity of both particulars and universals, of both the one and the many, and theirrelationship, for otherwise he could formulate nothing. To assume the ultimacy of chance is todeny the possibility of science and of meaning. As Pei has observed, Unless we choose toaccept the doctrine of predestination, it is chance that makes history.

23Van Til has summarizedthe matter clearly:

Sinners use the principle of Chance back of all things and the idea of exhaustiverationalization as the legitimate aim of science. If the universe were actually what

these men assume it to be according to their principle, there would be no science.Science is possible and actual only because the non-believers principle is nottrueand the believers principle is true. Only because God has created the universeand does control it by His providence, is there such a thing as science at all.24

6.Political Perspectives

If God has truly and causally created all things and is himself sovereign, self-contained, andtriune, then no fact is a fact apart from Him, nor can any fact have a valid interpretation in and ofitself. God-created factuality means God-interpreted factuality.25Apart from God, there is only

the concept of brute factuality, facts in and of themselves and without any relationship ormeaning in terms of one another, a sea of meaningless and unrelated particulars, or else theabsorption of all facts into the ocean of being and their loss of both identity and particularmeaning. The first means a world of anarchistic atoms or particulars, and the second means atotalitarian and obliterating unity. Much if not most anarchism escapes from its total isolationismand meaninglessness by discovering the whole as present in every part. In Simone Weil,anarchism thus ended in the tyranny of the one. A friendly scholar thus describes her Utopia:


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Simone Weils utopia is essentially a system of production in which every worker

would determine his own behavior by reason alone, without reference to anyrules, with respect both to his own role in the productive process and the coordi-nation of his role with the roles of all the other members of the community.

In such a society, everyone would be in a position to control the entire life of thecommunity, so community life would always be in conformity with the generalwill. Would this not put the whole society at the mercy of a single arbitrary act?The situation is excluded conceptually, because there is only one single, identicalreason for all men; they become foreign and impenetrable to one another onlywhen they depart from it; thus a society in which the necessary and sufficientcondition of all material life is that everyone exercises his reason would becompletely transparent to every mind.

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The similarity to Marxism is readily apparent, as is the reason why anarchism historically hasworked so closely with socialism and communism.

In orthodox trinitarian Christianity, the problem of the one and the many is resolved. Unity andplurality are equally ultimate in the Godhead, and temporalunity and plurality are on a basis ofequal validity. There is thus no basic conflict between individual and community. The individuallives in community, and the community flourishes as the individual finds himself and grows interms of consistently Christian faith. Instead of a basic philosophical hostility between individualand government, believer and church, person and family, there is a necessary co-existence.Neither the one nor the many is reducible to the other. They cannot seek the obliteration of theother, for that involves self-obliteration. The Augustinian and Calvinistic faith, by its hostility tosubordinationism, holds, if developed, the possibilities for true social order, and, to the extentthat Augustinianism and Calvinism have been followed, Western culture has developed bothfreedom and order. When christological subordinationism has set in, that is, the subordinatestatus of the second person of the trinity affirmed, statism has arisen, as in Byzantium Russia(with its docetic Christology), Anglicanism, and modernism, to cite but a few instances. Theequal ultimacy of the one and the many is disturbed, and the order of revelation demoted. TheRoman emperors were intensely aware of this fact, and, to promote statism, supported Arianismand other subordinationist views as essential to the maintenance of the state as the one true orderin which mans life was totally comprehended. The hostility to Athanasius rested on thispremise. The Council of Chalcedon in 451, by affirming the full trinitarian faith, was thus thesignificant victory that led to what is called Western civilization. Reductionism is the outcome ofa faulty Christology. Once the eternal One and Many is negated in its equal ultimacy, it ceases tobe the framework of reference, and an immanent one absorbs the many. This immanent one theRoman, Byzantine, and Holy Roman Empires sought to be, as does the modern state, and nowthe United Nations. Instead of the focal point being a transcendental one and many, which nohuman order, as created being, could embody, the temporal order became the frame of reference.The eternal order was denied so that a human one could replace it. The divine emperors, and thedivine right of kings, rested on this philosophical premise, and the Byzantine court developed atheology of the emperor and court. Modern statism is a descendant of this faith. Whetherdemocracy, communism, or the United Nations, it sees the fulfilment of man in terms of thestate, the true One and Reality of being. Man, after Aristotle, is seen as a social animal who ex-


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ists truly only in the state. There is no law beyond the state, so that, whether in Russia or theUnited States, Christianity must be denied its role as the basis of law and be given at best toler-ation as a peripheral or non-essential factor in mans history. Man is now defined as humanityrather than the individual, and this great one, humanity, to be truly a unity, must exist as onestate. In this picture, any assertion of individuality, local or national independence, or the reality

of races, is viewed with hostility and as a sign of mental sickness; it is an assertion of pluralitywhich challenges the reality and unity of the universal. It is a sick shattering of the greatoneness of being. But, since differences and distinctions are basic to all description anddefinition, meaning disappears as this universal triumphs. We have noted the bold derogation ofall plurality and meaning in Milarepa. There are signs of a similar boldness in modern championsof this exclusive universal, humanity as a world state. Thus, Rimbaud, Ginsberg, Henry Miller,and others negate all other meanings in terms of the one reality, humanity, but humanity seen astotally divorced from Christian-ity, law, morality, and civilization. The tension between the oneand the many, in non-Christian systems, means the exclusiveness of one or the other, with theend result being the total meaninglessness of categories, whether in Milarepa or Miller.

7.Implications for Education and Freedom

Basic then to all cultures and civilizations is an answer to the problem of the one and the many.The fact that this century witnesses an organized philosophical, educational, religious, andpractical evasion of the problem makes it only more urgent and our plight more serious. Formaleducation today is a tool for the systematic destruction of knowledge because it bypasses thebasic questions. It is Alexandrian, learned but ignorant, and given to masses of detail without afocus. As at the end of the Middle Ages, the academic world again is plagued by a reign ofdunces. A curious footnote to history is the fact that John Duns Scotus (1266 or 1274-1308), thefather of the dunces, was followed in his Realism by the American Charles Peirce (1839-1914),

who influenced James, Dewey, and Royce. But, irrespective of these men, the fact remains thattheir eras saw a rise of statism because the prevailing thought of the day moved towards anexclusive principle of unity. Duns Scotus indeed tried to give the individual place within the one,but the era as a whole tended either to a mystical absorption of the plurality by the one, or ashattering of all unity by the assertion of the autonomy of the many.

In our day, when philosophy, economic theory, psychiatry, and politics question the idea of thesoul, and at times even of the mind of man, concepts such as liberty are basically irrelevant.Where is mans freedom in Freud, Marx, Keynes, or Dewey?

The upsurge of mass-conditioning in this century has spelled the demise of the

autonomous man who has been so enthusiastically proclaimed by liberal theorists.Autonomy may still be a reality for the small minority who operate theconditioning processor who manage to escape it. But because the vast bulk ofthe community passively receives the attitudes which are implanted in them, it isnecessary for us to recast our thinking about the individual in politics. If hismind is not his own, the notions which we have inherited from liberal theorymust be overhauled, or even discarded. Conceptions such as consent,

obedience, obligation, leadership, public opinion, representative


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government, majority rule, and even freedom must take on new meanings.

The traditional definitions which spring from liberal theory may perhaps still holdtrue for those who plan the conditioning of others. But they are gross malapropsfor those whose minds are on the receiving end. And this latter group contains thevast majority of us.27

Such a perspective rests on a doctrine of man which is non-Christian and without any awarenessof the trinitarian answer to the problem of the one and the many. Our anthropology, or doctrineof man, is a product of our theology, our doctrine of God. When the temporal one and manyproblem is viewed in non-trinitarian terms, either the anarchistic autonomy of man, the many, isasserted, or the totalitarian reign of the one, the State or some other total order. The problemcannot be evaded, and, to be met, the right questions must first be raised.

8. The Question of Authority

The implications for the practical question of authority are now apparent. In Nominalism,sovereignty and authority rest with the many, with individuals, who are a law unto themselves.No law beyond themselves can have any binding power over them. The logic of Nominalismleads it into anarchy. Realism, however, renders sovereignty and authority into the hands of theone, whether bishop or caesar. There is no appeal beyond this powerful unity, and no right whichcan be logically asserted against it.

As against this impasse, orthodox Chalcedonian trin-itarianism asserts the transcendence ofsovereignty, which rests in the triune God. Temporal authority is ministerial or delegated power,subject to God and His law. Authority rests both in the temporal unity and in the plurality, and itstrue exercise requires this diffusion. Since there is an equal ultimacy of unity and plurality in the

eternal One-and-Many, there is an equal delegation of authority in the temporal one and many. Incivil government, to cite one instance of a temporal one and many, this means that there is adivision of powers, a general diffusion of authority, and a balance of controls and powersthroughout the entire structure of civil government, from citizenry on through all the diversifiedstructure of their government. Both liberties and powers are alike limited, under God, and henceunder law. Liberty is limited and power is limited because the temporal order is under God. Theeffect historically of this concept on Reformed church structures, on institutional life, and oncivil government and constitutional theory is of major importance. Whatever other influencesmay have been at work, it is apparent that, in the shaping of the United States, a truly Christianconcept of the one and the many was a decisive, if often unrecognized, presupposition.Restoration of this presupposition, and further development of its implications, is basic to mans

future in its every facet. We are still living on the unearned increment of past ages, reaping fromfields we did not sow, and harvesting from ancient trees we never planted. This as of old is theroad to Babylon and to captivity. Faced with such a threat, an ancient precedent should give uswarning. Zedekiah tried every practicalanswer but avoided the essentialone. His premise wasbasically Babylonian, and, as a result, his small Babylon in Judea fell before Nebuchadnezzarsgreater one. Then as now, we are no stronger than our foundations.


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Chapter II

The Ground of Liberty

1.Introduction

Liberty has been a recurring factor in history, and has repeatedly been a commanding aspect ofthe human scene, only then to disappear into an order in essence and action radically hostile to it.It is important, therefore, to consider the root and ground of true liberty. Liberty has obviouslybeen repeatedly accidental, as in medieval Moslem culture; it has disappeared with none to regretits passing as the inner logic of a culture has progressively manifested itself and dropped theprocedural tensions which for a season gave rise to liberty. Liberty is thus comparable tohappiness in that it is a result, not to be sought for as a primary end, but rather as the product oftrue order. And, even as a basically unhappy man can have happy moments, so basically anti-libertarian cultures can have periods of liberty without any deviation from their fundamentalnature. This point is especially relevant, in that current libertarian movements are radically

premised on the same grounds as messianic statism, on the Enlightenment and its faith.

The history of the West has seen, as Herman Dooyeweerd has analyzed it, four cultural motives,all based on radically religious premises.28These premises are not always recognized; they oftenfunction as the unrecognized axioms of thought and are all the more powerful by virtue of thebasically religious commitment to them. Moreover, these cultural premises have as their basis aphilosophical tension. With the exception of the Christian motive, they are all dialectical innature, which means that they are basically and intrinsically divided by an irrevocable religiousand philosophical antithesis, two central motive powers in tension and conflict. In such asituation, liberty often arises as a by-product of dialectical imbalance, as was the case in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only to disappear subsequently. As the recognition of the

irrevocability of the tension becomes more and more clear, the culture collapses.

This philosophical tension is, as Cornelius Van Til has shown, between the one and the many,between unity and diversity, universality and particularity.29 The question which haunts thedialectical culture is this: how to have unity without totally undifferentiated and meaninglessoneness? If all things are basically one, then differences are meaningless, divisions false, anddefinitions are sophistications, in that the tyranny, or destiny, of oneness is the truth of all being.But, if all things are basically many, and if plurality is ultimate, then the world dissolves intounrelated particulars and becomes, as some thinkers insist, not a universe but a multiverse, andevery atom is in a sense its own law and being. The first leads to the breakdown of differencesand the liberty of atomistic individualism and particularity; the second is the breakdown of

fundamental law into nihilism and the retreat of men and their arts into isolated and privateuniverses. Our nave experience testifies to the reality of both the one and the many. The historyof thought and culture testifies to the continual shattering of cultures on the impossibility of theirtheoretical, religious, cultural, and political reconciliation apart from the premise of consistentlybiblical thought and faith. Operative in all these other philosophies, all apostate from theChristian perspective, is the presupposed autonomy of theoretical thought, i.e., reason playingthe role of god and ultimate judge rather than reason as reason.


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2.Liberty and Dialectics

All this means that, at the very least, two questions are involved in any discussion of liberty.First, what is true liberty, liberty not as the accident of a culture but as an aspect and product of

its essence?

Second, is liberty worthwhile? The second question is an obvious one, but it needs to berecognized. Liberty is worthwhile only when it has an essential relation to the faith of a culture.A few years ago, Lin Yutang called attention to the change in Western culture since PatrickHenry said, Give me liberty or give me death! Those words once electrified men. The only

whisper we can hear now is, Give me security or give me death! Put me in a col lectivistic jail ifyou want, but give me a meal ticket and an old-age coupon! What a comedown for arevolutionist! What an amazing contrast to the hope of man in the eighteenth century!

30Thequestion of liberty is thus in a very real measure a question of faith. Mans current problem in theeconomic realm is not that capitalism has failed but that man has failed. As a result, capitalism,

liberty, and individualism all have an unpleasant and distasteful ring to man; their very successadds to their offense when man himself is a failure.

What is it in Western culture that has produced this recurring revulsion for liberty? Why has itbeen so widely prevalent again in our day? We have cited its repeated abandonment in dialecticalcultures; let us now examine the cultural motives of Western civilization in terms of this concern.

The antithesis or dialectic of Greek culture came to be, as a result of a long development, theform-matter motive. The differences between Greek philosophers were differences of emphasis;the common presupposition of all was the form-matter motive.31Two worlds were thus seen inmixture, but as basically alien to one another, one, the world of nature, or matter, of hard

reality and atoms, and the other, the world of form, ideas, universals; the first is given to changeand flux, the other is timeless, unchanging, and eternal. Reality, the real world, was thus made upin some fashion of two antithetical and irreconcilable elements. Nave experience might see thisall as one world, but theoretical thought understood it as an irrevocably dialectical existence.Accordingly, as theoretical thought dealt progressively with this problem, it becameprogressively aware that its dialectics was destroying rather than undergirding human faith andculture; it tended steadily to denegate or suppress one or another aspect of this dualisticinterpretation of reality. If matter were stressed, then all things were reduced to atoms, all else inreality being dismissed as subjective and illusionary, with consequent cynicism and culturalcollapse. If form or ideas were stressed, then mysticism became mans escape from the falseworld of appearance or matter. Mysticism is always incapable of dealing with the problems of

culture because it is a denial of their validity. The great one must absorb all reality, andindividuation is an unhealthy separation. Neoplatonic mysticism permeated the Greco-Romanworld, and it quickly infiltrated the church thinly disguised as Christianity. Thus Simon Styliteswas under constant disapproval as far as the church was concerned, and his roots were inNeoplatonism and the Atargatis cult. The mystical contempt of the world, however, always hasas its counterpart the materialistic contempt of law and meaning as subjective, relative, orirrelevant. Thus the Cynics, who came into prominence in Greece in the fourth century B.C. andcontinued to be prominent to the sixth century A.D., held that hedonism or happiness was the


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only true goal for life, and that the wise man, furthermore, sought to decrease his desires as thewiser means of attaining happiness. Cynicism thus fathered Stoicism. (The Cyrenaic schooldiffered in that it sought to increase the satisfactions.) The name of both schools was derivedfromKyon, dog, and the name is revelatory. Since law and with it ethics had been excluded fromthe hard world of reality as subjective nonsense, the philosophers of this school often

deliberately aped dogs (in shamelessness, begging, barking, and biting) and even copulated inpublic to express their contempt of any philosophy which would exalt man above his animalreality. Man being an atom in an atomic world, self-sufficiency became his goal, to beindependent of any law outside of his own desires, and to be wholly dependent on his own innerresources for happiness. Thus Diogenes of Sinope (died shortly after 325 B.C.), who is wellknown for his pseudo-search for an honest man, demonstrated these doctrines very vividly. Hewas independent of housing. He held that the sexual urge was totally natural, and that to seekprivacy in its satisfaction, or to be governed by prohibitions such as that against incest, was un-natural. (In our day, Kinsey has classified homosexuality and animal contacts with marital sex

as alike normal, because natural, outlets.) Diogenes saw no reason to prefer one woman toanother, or, if a woman were lacking, he prescribed open and public masturbation as a natural

and prophylactic measure, stating that he wished all hungers were equally easy to satisfy.Likewise Diogenes saw no valid objection to cannibalism. Thus, Diogenes was ready to grantextreme license, and yet, by his contempt of anything destructive of atomism, he was at one andthe same time given to fantastic ascetic practices to avoid dependence on others. The differenceis not great; both mysticism and asceticism on the one hand, and materialistic atomism on theother, involve a denial of an aspect of reality and run into both a wild emotionalism and a readycastration of the whole man and his life. Thus, on the one hand, wealth and success werereligiously reprehensible and dirty, whereas, on the other, as much later in the French andRussian Revolutions, and in Nazi thought, culture was a divisive and ugly thing, a pretension asagainst the hard world of material, political, and economic reality. The reported Nazi statement,When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver, epitomizes the recurring temper ofdiseased societies. Modern music, art, and literature are at war against culture.

The medieval Roman Catholic nature-grace motive retained the dialectical character of Greekthought. The natural world was a realm in itself, knowable by means of autonomous reason,which, while unable to penetrate the mysteries of the supernatural, was still self-sufficient interms of the natural. Grace thus neither canceled nature nor superseded it, but rather perfected it,in terms of Scholastic thought. In the natural realm, no authority but reason needed to beacknowledged, although it was assumed that nature would not contradict grace. Indeed, it couldnot, since two separate worlds were involved. Man dwelt in one world as a perishable andmaterial body, and in the other as an ostensibly rational and immortal soul. Here the Greek form-matter motive is seen in thinly Christianized terminology and form. Again, the same nemesisplagued it. The Nominalists simply denied the reality of the universals of the world of grace; theworld again relapsed into atomism. If reason were sovereign in its realm, and reason knewnothing of this realm of grace with its law, then reason must conclude that this world of graceand law was not real. And, assuming the reality of the two worlds, what held them together? Theresult was cynicism and mysticism. Extravagant mystical and ascetic practices flourished.Various cults gave license to nudism and sexual promiscuity in the name of the newChristianity. Physical degeneration characterized the man of the late Middle Ages, andmedieval historians have estimated that, at Luthers coming, one third to one half of Europe was


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infected by venereal diseases, then far more virulent than now. Churchmen themselves, often ledby popes, gave expression to both radical cynicism and a frenetic immorality. As in the case ofGreco-Roman culture, the decline was not without its sky-rocketing by-products, startling buteventually earth-bound manifestations of one facet or another. Thus, the Renaissance wasdedicated to a materialistic atomism on the one hand, and a revival of Neoplatonism on the other.

Both were equally sterile in the long run, and the atomism paved the way for the Renaissancetyrant by its destruction of the concept of fundamental law. Restraint was thus removed.

3. The Enlightenment

The next great cultural motive, having roots in the two previous dialectics and in the humanismof the Renaissance, came to a sharp statement in the Enlightenment. The dialectical tension wasnow between nature and freedom. Man was the ostensible resolution of this dialectic. InDescartes, man became the focal point of these two worlds. Various devices were used toattempt to overcome the handicap of mans previous dialectics. To avoid atomism in the natural

order, the state was posited as a body created by social contract between autonomous andatomistic men. To avoid the collapse of the spiritual realm, the realm of freedom or value, themind was credited with creative power in the religious sense. As Dooyeweerd has pointed out,Hobbes, in the foreword to hisDe Corpore, declared that the mind should first destroy the givenworld, and then, god-like, re-create it by theoretical thought, for, according to Hobbes, logicalthought should create, like God or like the artist.

32Because the state was the creation of man, itwas believed that, in a special sense, whereas by contrast the family was given and the churchsomewhat external to the natural realm, the state became all the more powerful, real, andnatural precisely because it was mans creation in the world of nature. Likewise, in the realmof value, man was creating his own contracts, laws, and standards and thereby asserting hisautonomy. Rootlessness was conceived of as an intellectual virtue, in that the denial of the past,

of history and of God, was essential to the true sovereignty and creativity of man.

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In ImmanuelKant, the sovereignty of this autonomous man and his reason came to full focus, and hence torapid dissolution as the dialectical tension became paramount. For him, the true self of man isidentical with the law which man himself creates. Thus, man became truly sovereign, and, inKants theoretical and practical reason, became the creator of his world and of his values. Kant

sought also, as against Hume, to establish the validity of science. In the process of doing so, healso heightened the dialectical tension between nature and freedom. Indeed, a new set ofexpressions articulated this cultural motive. On the one hand,science andfaith were seen as thetwo irreconcilable worlds of nature (science) andfreedom (faith), and, on the other, the revealingterminology that came into usage at the same time saw it as a dualism of reality and value. Asscience came into increasing prominence, prestige, and power with the twentieth century, this

dualism worked more sharply to drive a wedge between nature, science, and reality on the onehand, and freedom, faith, and value on the other. Kinsey has not been the only scientist to turn onfreedom, faith, and value with all the dogged and determined scientism of the ancient Cynics.This dialectic is basic to modern thought, as almost any textbook gives witness. Thus, soinfluential a text writer as Edwin Arthur Burtt, in his Principles and Problems of Right Thinking,A Textbook for Logic, Reflective Thinking and Orientation Courses (1928), devoted a centralchapter introductory to his concluding section to Fact Versus Value. But this very statement of

the dialectic is its breakdown. Religion, freedom, value, morality, and law are seen as non-


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factual, implicitly subjective and as merely pragmatic or relativistic. As a result of thisbreakdown, crisis again grips the West, already twice rescued by the entrance and revival ofbiblical faith. The reality which remains is either an atomistic and lawless particularity, or theundifferentiated and meaningless oneness of matter or energy in motion, in either instance hostileto value and to liberty.

4. The Crisis

The dilemma is a very real one, and, in terms of the cultural motive, insuperable. Detach law,because it is an expression of value, from reality, and law as unreal and subjective disappears, aslaw in the integral sense has disappeared under pragmatic, relativistic, and historistic thinking.Attach law to reality as an aspect of matter or energy, it ceases to be a value and becomes ablind, deterministic force hostile to mans liberty. Thus liberty is dissolved either into myth orinto license, and if license, becomes anti-law in nature. In terms of the blind force of nature,liberty is no more than determinism and a myth. In terms of the world of value, liberty is again a

myth: it has no reality or meaning because it is a part of that unreal world. In terms of atomisticparticularity, liberty is anti-law. In terms of the oneness of reality, it is a divisive separation fromthe wholeness of the unity of being. With the collapse of the dialectic comes mysticism orcynicism. Occultist and mystical books are the unacknowledged (because undignified) bestsellers of our day. Modern art and literature are extensively mystical, although not in themedieval sense; they are an openly pagan mysticism. They are dedicated to private andsubjective worlds of meaning, and are built on the hatred of and flight from the material worldand realism, into the vast ocean of unconsciousness considered as true value. The extent of opencynicism in our culture is apparent in such works as Lawrence Liptons The Holy Barbarians(1959). GinsbergsHowl was at its trial defended as religious and moral by university professorsprecisely because it denied all law and morality in favor of a new creed: the equal value or non-

value and acceptability of all things. To this new gospel of cynicism Henry Millers Tropic ofCancer and other works are dedicated. Today also, as in the days of the Roman circus, markedinterest is shown in another natural levelling phenomenon, bestiality, and pornographic filmsshowing trained dogs copulating with women are beginning to appear at smokers and special

showings. When meaning is gone, and the exploration of reality in terms of fundamental mean-ing collapses, then the exploration of sensation takes its place. The process, in the Greek text ofRomans 1:27, is described by Paul as the burning out of man.

5. The Libertarian Failure

In the face of this, some libertarians have sought to revivify culture and reestablish liberty byreturning to the eighteenth century formulation of the dialectic. Apart from the difficulty ofgiving life to a faulty and dying faith, this attempt is doomed to failure in that it fails to see thesource of the cultural problem. By its limited although important concern, liberty, it overlooksthe basic matter of faith and fails to recognize that the liberty it looks back to was a youthfulaccident of the humanistic dialectic, of which statism is the essence. However, more perceptivelibertarians have attempted to keep up with the times by recognizing the death of values as suchand seeking somehow to draw out a new kind of value from the world of science out of brute


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factuality. These libertarians attempt to extract, from the great god nature, by means of science inthe form of tests, measurements, or natural laws, some results to prove that nature does permitliberty. Thus much has been made of the physicists discovery of the principle of indeterminacy,to cite one example, i.e., the one most prominently used in this century. But scientificindeterminacy is not much more than chance variation. It is blind, impersonal, and purposeless.

Statistical probability is not liberty. Moreover, this procedure merely underscores thesubservience of man and of mans illusory liberty to nature, a blind force or energy in motion.Furthermore, the essential point is missed, namely, that modern man is not primarily interested inliberty, and often is not interested in it at all. Above all else, as Dooyeweerd has stated it,modern man has lost himself,

34and he cannot grieve greatly over other things when faced withthis primary loss, and with the sense of the total collapse of all meaning. When man findshimself, to use a characteristic expression of Van Til, on the frightening and vast shore ofundifferentiated being, he has no standard by which to value himself or anything else in allcreation. Liberty is thus inevitably irrelevant. The average libertarian fails to see this problembecause he is often unaware of his own position of relative wealth. Having usually been reared ina Christian home, he lives on unearned increment and steadily lays waste his inherited capital,

which he treats as a fact of nature rather than a past Christian victory. He assumes civilization, asJose Ortega y Gasset said the typical scientist does, whom he described in The Barbarism ofSpecialisation as believing that civilisation is there in just the same way as the earths crustand the forest primeval.

35This fearful error is reinforced by the myth of evolution, which treatscivilization and culture as natural products of mans evolutionary development in the same basicsense as nest building is a part of the life of birds. Mans blindness is thus doubly ensured.

The libertarian contribution has been a splendid one in the narrow provinces of literary criticismand political and economic thought, but it has been oblivious to the larger issue. By avoiding thelarger issue, it has been at times both marginal and parasitic; this is apparent in the hope of somelibertarians for another Burke, i.e., for a man reflecting Christian tradition without being fully

a part of it. Its hunger has too often been for God without God. This hope was well expressed inthe title of one book, John Crowe Ransoms God without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of

Orthodoxy (1930).36This purely sociological orthodoxy has its nemesis: since it is without truecommitment, it is equally usable to justify statism, as notably in Machiavelli and ReinholdNiebuhr, and it still fails to answer the dialectical tension.

6. The Christian Answer

As Van Til points out, in Christology and Barthianism, all non-biblical thought is dialectical,and all of it expresses itself in the form of a religious dualism. Moreover, as Van Til has

pointed out in another context, all such thought is immanentistic and is dedicated to the principleof continuity. By its immanence philosophy, it insists that all power, purpose, and meaning mustbe inherent in the world of nature, so that it seeks to envelop God in his cosmos. By means ofthe principle of continuity, all things are reduced to a common being.37Modern thought, whetherMarxist or libertarian, is alike established on the Enlightenments dialectic. This does notobscure the internal differences. But, even as the Nominalists and Realists of Scholasticismshared a common world and a common fate, so contemporary facets of the humanistic dialectic,however hostile, share a common destiny as the dialectical tension tears their world apart. No


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late medievalIndex or Inquisition could stem the decay; neither can Soviet tyranny and suppres-sion, which only testify to the abiding and growing collapse of the dialectic; the Sovietintellectual does not believe in the cultural motives he is expected to champion.

The Christian cultural motive has been, although mainly peripheral, nonetheless the vitality of

Western culture since the fifth century, when the Council of Chalcedon, facing a world indisintegration, boldly asserted the Christology which is basic to true liberty.38This motive hasbeen described by Dooyeweerd as the biblical theme of creation, fall into sin and redemption byJesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God, in the communion of the Holy Spirit.

39According toCalvin, the ground and presupposition of self-knowledge is the knowledge of God. Accordingly,self-knowledge transcends the theoretical attitude of thought.40This means that, because manis not self-created and because the universe is not mans creation, mans knowledge of himselfand his world must be governed by the prior interpretation of the Creator. Mans knowledge isthus not creative but, in the Christian sense, analogical. To follow Van Til, whose formulationhere is the decisive one, the Christian motive is basically that of the ontological trinity asrevealed in Scripture. God is eternal and uncreated being, and the universe is His creation and

thus created being; it has meaning only in terms of Him since He is its creator and sustainer. Thistriune God is the eternal One-and-Many as distinct from the temporal one and many. In God theone and the many are equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental than diversity, anddiversity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The persons of the Trinity are mutuallyexhaustive of one another. The Son and the Spirit are ontologically on a par with the Father.Moreover, It is only in the Christian doctrine of the triune God, as we are bound to believe, thatwe really have a concrete universal. In Gods being there are no particulars not related to theuniversal and there is nothing universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars. It goeswithout saying that if we hold to the eternal one and many in the manner explained above wemust hold the temporal one and many to be created by God. If the creation doctrine is thustaken seriously, it follows that the various aspects of created reality must sustain such relations toone another as have been ordained between them by the Creator, as superiors, inferiors or equals.All aspects being equally created, no one aspect of reality may be regarded as more ultimate thananother.41The whole body of Van Tils writings is given to the development of this concept ofthe ontological trinity and its philosophical implications.

For our purposes, briefly stated, very important implications are clearly apparent. There is in thisposition no dialectical tension. Because of the Trinity, the equal ultimacy of the one and themany, we are not faced with the insoluble Scylla and Charybdis of all theoretical thought. We arenot faced with a vast, undifferentiated and meaningless ocean of being which swallows up allthings. Neither are we faced with an infinite and atomistic particularity, in which the many arewithout contact with one another. There is no need for the cultural yawing between a destructivecollectivism and an atomistic particularity. Both the one and the many are equally created andhence equally concreteand equally under the absolute law of the eternal One-and-Many.Instead of a cultural tension, for example, between state and man, there is a cultural unity as bothare undergirded and have meaning in terms of the fundamental law of God, which governs anddelimits all things.

7.Law and Liberty


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A basic aspect of this meaning is law. Mans liberty is rooted and grounded in this law, as SirWalter Scott, in terms of his Calvinistic heritage, saw when he opposed to the French Rev-olutions Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, his own battle cry, written for the Scottish

Dragoons, Liberty and Laws. Because the fulness of mans meaning is discernible only in

terms of his Creator and the creative purpose, it is impossible, if man is in harmony with God,for liberty and law to be in conflict. Even as a fish needs water to live in, because it is hisenvironment or law-sphere, and liberation intoair would kill him, so man finds his true libertyin Gods law, his environment. The law becomes a curse to apostate man, since it makes it clearthat his course apart from Gods law sphere is death, but to the redeemed man, it is theenvironment of life.42

Man, created in the image of God, has a cultural mandate, i.e., to exercise the implications of thatimage, to be Gods king, priest, and prophet in, to, and over all creation, subduing it, i.e.,bringing it under his dominion in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. The fall, redeemedmans return to God and the development of his status under God, and fallen mans developing

apostasy, all these things and more are circumscribed by the eternal decree of God. They are apart of the permission and plan of God in order to further what Van Til calls epistemologicalself-consciousness, mans self-awareness of the ground of his knowledge and being and the fulldevelopment of the implications of his regeneration or of his apostasy. History, then, is theprocess whereby epistemological self-consciousness is brought to maturity. It has, therefore, adouble maturation, as the parable of the tares and wheat makes clear (Matt. 13:24-30, 36-43), thematuration of both good and evil. Apostate man will become progressively more dialectical inhis thinking and more and more given to the absolutizing of the relative, and the deification ofhis autonomy and his theoretical thought. Redeemed man, as Gods vicegerent living in terms of

the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom. 8:21), will progressively develop theimplications of his image in terms of his mandate to know and use creation in terms of the wordof God. To subdue it as king under God, as Van Til has pointed out, man must interpret thecreation as prophet under God, and represent God as priest and dedicate the world to Him. Manis like God... but always on a creaturely scale. He was organically related to the universe

about him. That is, man was to be prophet, priest and king under God in this created world. Thevicissitudes of the world would depend upon the deeds of man. 43Christ, as very God and veryman, was the true prophet, priest, and king and mans federal head and representative, reinstating

him into communion with God and into standing with God by His representative and vicariousatonement for mans violating of that law. Since, as Chalcedon saw clearly, the two natures were

in Him without commingling or confusion, the confusion of the divine and the human whichcharacterizes non-Christian thought was forestalled.

This is the framework of liberty. Its biblical character has been the decisive factor in Westernhistory, even though its nature has been only spasmodically apprehended. The Reformation setforth this motive, although Melanchthon quickly absorbed Lutheranism, and Beza, Calvinism,into the older and newer dialectics without clear recognition of the full nature of the Christianmotive. The churches of today are radically infected either by the dialectics of Scholasticism orof pre- and post-Kantian humanism, by the presuppositions of the Enlightenment. At their verybest, their witness is limited to soteriology in a fragmentary sense, and the broad cultural callingis bypassed by conservatism or associated with humanism and statism by religious liberalism. As


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a result of this failure and also of the general cultural failure, van Riessens comment is an apt

description of our time: The disintegration of existence, i.e., the dissolution of coherence in the

elements of existence, has reached an advanced stage for a great many people.44

Men who find life itself meaningless or worthless usually find little value in attempts to recall

past liberties. Liberty belongs for them to a dead world of meaning. That true world of meaningmust first be restored if liberty is to be given its rightful place and respect.


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Chapter Three

The Continuity of Being

1.Egypt

Apart from biblically governed thought, the prevailing concept of being has been that being isone and continuous. God, or the gods, man, and the universe are all aspects of one continuousbeing; degrees of being may exist, so that a hierarchy of gods as well as a hierarchy of men canbe described, but all consist of one, undivided and continuous being. The creation of any newaspect of being is thus not a creation out of nothing, but a creation out of being, in short, aprocess of being. This conception of being in process, when seen in its cosmic aspect, can beeither static or dynamic, the framework of reference being history. The process is static if itflows upward out of history, as in ancient Egypt; being in this perspective has achieved a desiredearthly order and now exists to serve, magnify, and then move into the eternal order. The processis dynamic if it flows forward through history towards a final historical order, or if it merely

flows forward as endless process, as in Mesopotamian thought. In both forms, a cyclic view ispossible, and eternal cyclic renovationwas an aspect of Egyptian Hermetic thought as well asof other philosophies.45

For Egyptian thought, god and man were of a common nature and alike products of a commonbeing. As Wilson has observed, Between god and man there was no point at which one coulderect a boundary line and state that here substance changed from divine, superhuman, immortal,to mundane, human, mortal. The Egyptian religious faith was not monothe istic butmonophysite, not one god but one nature in common to gods and men. It is not a matter ofsingle god but of single nature of observed phenomena in the universe, with the clear possibilityof exchange, and substitution. With relation to gods and men the Egyptians were monophysites:

many men and many gods, but all ultimately of one nature.

46

This common nature was sharedby the entire universe in varying degrees and set forth in various aspects of worship. Juvenal, inSatire 15, commented on the garden gods of Egypt: It is an impious outrage to crunch leeksand onions with the teeth. What a holy race to have such divinities springing up in theirgardens!

47

Both gods and men developed or evolved, and in a very real sense, battled their way out of theoriginal chaos of being. According to Fontenrose, The peoples of the Near and Middle Eastlooked upon creation as a process of bringing order out of chaos. This is both process and

combat. For the cosmos has been won from the chaos that still surrounds it, as a cultivated plotfrom the encompassing wilderness.48Chaos or darkness generates life; it is both the source of

life and the enemy of life. Life requires order, which means putting a limit upon action incertain directions. But an order that resists all change and further creative activity denies life andturns into its opposite: it becomes a state of inactivity and death. Chaos and life are thus in anecessary tension: life without chaos becomes death, but life which surrenders to chaos andabandons order is also death. Life requires order, and order means death, the triumph of chaos.As Fontenrose notes, This is only to say that both life forces and death forces are necessary in aproperly balanced individual and world.49 Here we have the dialectic of man in the ancientworld: chaos and life, a dialectic which undergirds much of subsequent thought. Expressed in


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worldwide myths of antiquity, it reappears as modern medical science in the psychoanalysis ofFreud and his theory of Eros and Thanatos, life instincts and death instincts.50

Chaos and cosmos must thus coexist in balance in the ideal state. Cosmos means the world of thegods and the world of men, heaven and earth, and chaos is the underworld. The ideal state, the

high point of being and the center of the world, is that society where the three leve ls ofbeingheaven, earth, and the underworldare in communication, and this communication issometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi, which brings all threetogether.51A state or empire which dominated the world scene of its day was especially sure thatits society represented the center of the earth, the high point in the process of being to date, thatorder in which chaos, men, and the gods were in communication. Thus, in Assyria, the kingofficiated before a garlanded pole or tree which has been explained as the ritual centre of theearth.

52This communication was the basis of political and religious life: reality is conferredthrough participation in the symbolism of the Center: cities, temples, houses become real by thefact of being assimilated to the center of the world.53

This communication rested in a community of being, through participation in one commonbeing, out of which the gods had germinated and developed, and from whom men weregerminated. According to the Papyrus of Ani,

The Osiris, the Scribe Ani, whose word is truth, saith: I flew up out of primevalmatter. I came into being like the god Khepera. I germinated (or, grew up) like theplants. I am concealed (or, hidden) like the tortoise (or, turtle) (in his shell). I amthe seed (?) of every god. I am Yesterday of the Four (Quarters of the Earth, and)the Seven Uraei, who came into being in the Eastern land. (I am) the Great One(i.e., Horus) who illumineth the Hememet spirits with the light of his body. (I am)that god in respect of Set. (I am) Thoth who (stood) between them (i.e., Horus andSet) as the judge on behalf of the Governor of Sekhem (Letopolis) and the Soulsof Anu (Heliopolis). (He was like) a stream between them. I have come. I rise upon my throne. I am endowed with a Khu (i.e., Spirit-soul). I am mighty. I amendowed with godhood among the gods. I am Khensu, (the lord) of every kind ofstrength.54

This pride of achievement manifested by the god Osiris can be shared by men. Man is able, byworks of righteousness, to become one with the gods. To become one with the heavenly beings,he must be able to affirm a confession, which, among other things, declared:

... I have not committed sin. I have not stolen.

... I have not slain men and women.

... I have not stolen the property of God.

... I have not committed adultery,

... I have not lain with men. I have made none to weep.

... I have not been an eavesdropper.

... I have not shut my ears to the word of truth.

... I have wronged none, I have done no evil.55


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Having been judged innocent, the deceased becomes divine, declaring, There is no member ofmy body which is not a member of a god. Thoth protecteth my body altogether, and I am Ra dayby day.

56 Salvation is deification. Moreover, It is not spiritual but physical salvation that issought.57 In the biblical faith, resurrection is an act of discontinuity and a miracle. In theEgyptian perspective, man, after death, manifested a continuity either towards chaos and

destruction or towards deity and resurrection. The doctrine of the resurrection in Egypt was set inthe context of a naturalistic, fertility cult perspective. The gods themselves are not immortal butperennial.

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The first creation arose out of the primeval waters of chaos, the gods and the primeval hillock ormountain arising and then becoming the source of subsequent being. Chaos is the ground ofbeing, and the source of being, and an Egyptian papyrus declared:

The All-Lord said, after he had come into being:I am he who came into being as Khepri. When I had come into being, being(itself) came into being, and all beings came into being after I came into being.59

The place of creation is the primeval hillock, mountain, or pyramid, arising out of the waters ofchaos to establish order. This sacred mountain or tower is the meeting-place of heaven and earth,where communication is established between heaven, earth, and hell. It is situated at the centerof the world. Every temple, or palaceand, by extension, every sacred city or royal residenceis a Sacred Mountain, thus becoming a Center.60 True social order requires peace andcommunication with both chaos and deity, and society either moves downward into chaos orforward into deification. The significance of the Tower of Babel is thus apparent: it denied thediscontinuity of Gods being and asserted mans claim to a continuity of being with God andheaven. The Tower was thegate to God and the gate of God, signifying that mans social ordermade possible an ascent of being into the divine order. The Egyptian pyramid set forth the samefaith.

The gods arose out of chaos, and the primeval earth hill or pyramid is their fitting symbol. Inrelationship to eternity, the gods stand thus: . In relationship to man, the pyramid is inverted:. Mans relationship to the gods and heaven is also symbolized by the pyramid, pointing

upward. In later mystery religions, and in Kabbalism especially, the two pyramids, the invertedpyramid of the gods and the sky-reaching pyramid of man, were brought together to form astar, , the double pyramid, the union of the human and the divine, their coalescence in thewar against chaos. Its first known Jewi

the one and the many: studies in the philosophy of order and ultimacy

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